Question

“Why are you crying?” said the woman to a little boy. “I want a balloon,” he said. Change it into indirect speech.

Answer 1

Hint: We need to follow certain rules while changing a sentence from direct to indirect speech-

We remove the quotation marks in indirect speech.

We have to change the tense into the corresponding past tense.

We also change the modal verbs in past tense form. Example- Can change to could.

Complete Step by Step Answer:

As given in the hint, we need to follow the given rules while changing direct speech into direct speech.
Direct speech refers to the words that were originally spoken by the speaker whereas, indirect speech refers to reporting the words spoken by a speaker in the past tense form.
Now, let’s look at interrogative sentences indirect speech-
We tend to replace the reporting verb with ‘asked’ in interrogative sentences.
Example- Direct speech: Why is she sleeping? Said the girl to the boy.
Indirect speech- The girl asked the boy why she was sleeping.
Hence, the correct answer is- The woman asked the little boy why he was crying. He replied that he wanted a balloon.

Note: We do not change the tense of the verb in direct speech if the reporting verb is in ‘present tense or future tense’.